Too Long, Too Long

I'll have more comments later on Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America by Peniel E. Joseph. My review will run in Newsday sometime next month.

But for the moment, let me just say that it is a very good book -- as absorbing as anything I've read in a while -- and that it will deserve all the praise it is bound to get.

The cover for the galleys says it will be published on August 1 by Henry Holt, but in fact finished copies are in stores now. Various articles by the author are available at his website.

By coincidence, I started reading the book at just about the same time word started getting around about a new album, , by Chicago hiphop artist Ecclesiastes, whose vision of urban guerilla warfare is probably going to give the American Civil Liberties Union a neat little project to work on, pretty soon. Check out his lyrics. Some cuts from the record are available here.

Peniel Joseph's history of the undercurrents in the early civil rights movement really places a track like"Waitin' in Line" in context.

The simplified narrative of the 1960 that is now part of the popular memory regards extremely militant, more or less Third Worldist versions of African-American politics as something that came to the fore pretty late -- only after the initial, more optimistic phase of the movement had passed.

Well, not quite. Joseph quotes from FBI reports from the early 1960s in which agents describe well-attended meetings where people discussed scenarios indistinguishable from the"people's war" rhetoric of Ecclesiastes.

I'm not saying that such talk therefore represents some"authentic" mood or political ideology within the African-American community. Hell, that's not my business anyway -- what with me being, as the saying goes, a white shade of pale -- though frankly the gun-totting fantasia seems futile at best, suicidal at worst.

But it's probably always been there -- alongside, and in tension with, more properly utopian images of transcendence and redemption, serving as both a critique of reformist hopes and an emergency backup plan for liberation.